Lightroom Tip: The Color Sampler Tool

You’ll notice a few tools in Lightroom that have a Color Picker built right inside of them. One place is in the Split Toning panel in the Develop module. Also, the Graduated Filter, Adjustment Brush and Radial filter all have them so you can paint or target a specific part of the photo to have a color tint added to it. Here’s an example of the color picker (circled below).

As you’d expect, when you click to see the color picker you can just click to sample any color from it that you want. But there’s actually a secret little tip that let’s you sample from a color in the photo if you wanted to match the same tones as your photo has. See, if you simply just click on your photo to try to sample the color, Lightroom will close the color picker box (rather than setting the color you want). So here’s the trick. Click inside the color picker first. Don’t let go of your mouse button yet though. Then just drag (while still clicked) outside of the picker and over your photo to force Lightroom to sample the color that your cursor is over.

Pretty cool huh? It’s definitely not one of those little things you’d ever stumble on, but if you ever need to match the color in your photo (without just guessing), now you’ve got a tool to do it. See ya!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

I think, however, the use of the color dropper in the Spit Tone section works differently. If you hover the dropper over the color pallette and then drag onto the Preview area (as Matt said to do), the entire photo changes to the color over which the mouse hovers in the photo. As well, the color palette refelcts the color currently coloring the entire photo. (or…did I miss something?)

On portrait with black black ground . Because lighting was not even , the black was uneven. I even out the black in ps. I thought I could do this in LR without going into ps. Thanks for the tips anyway.

Update on ACR Color Picker. John Wheeler from NAPP help desk had an idea to use the color picker in PS-CC and record the H S B numbers. Then using the Camera Raw filter go into ACR and use the H and S number in the Color picker window to get the color match. Also, make sure you use 11×11 pixel setting for PS color picker. I try this and it works! It’s not as perfect or as functional as LR, but if you have to use ACR for some reason, it will get you by. You do have to use the sliders in the adj brush to get the correct results, but that’s not a big deal.

Thanks for covering this little secret trick! I asked you about it on you blog, but didn’t get an answer. However, I stumbled upon it myself just messing around. I use this trick all the time now … especially with some of my autumn photos. Some info for you and our blog friends … this trick does not work with ACR! Rob Sylvan and I had a discussion on this today. He doesn’t know how to get ACR to do it either. Funny that both ACR and LR have the same engine, but slightly different functionality in this area. Thanks again! Great tip!

Once you’ve dragged the eyedropper outside of the colour sampler box, you need not stop at the borders of your image. If you’re using LR in a window, you can move the eyedropper tool over any point on your screen – even onto another program window and take a sample from there.